Animator

Lead Animator at ILM | Industry Mentor at KPU

Good e-Reader Intro Video

Over the summer as well, I had worked on a short freelance project to create an intro video to the company ‘Good e-Reader’. They wanted to follow a similar Pixar style intro, so I came up with this. I finished the modeling, shading, rigging, animation, lighting, and dust fx compositing within a month of work. The foley sound design just finished. Here is the final product!

On to the Amazing Spiderman 2!

At the beginning of summer, we finished the bulk of animation for Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2. I was fortunate enough to have 2 months off over the summer.

As soon as I finished Cloudy2, after several years of waiting and deciding, I took the opportunity to do laser eye surgery with my time off.  It turned out to be a very successful procedure with vision better than 20/20 and a fast recovery time.

Following the 2 weeks of recovery, I went to Comic-Con for my first time with free industry professional badges. It was quite an event, a place where you end up walking a lot! We even found the cloudy 2 crew walking around outside of the convention centre.

Over the summer I also shot a few weddings, an engagement shoot, and a couple maternity shoots.

At the end of August and a busy summer, I am back at work at Sony working on the upcoming movie Amazing Spiderman 2.

Oz: The Great and Powerful is an Anim wrap!

Since the start of April of 2012, I have been on this project for 8 months it has been a pretty crazy and difficult roller coaster ride. By the time we reached the end leg of the project, we were working from 70 – 85 hours a week, getting up to 7 days a week! Now that I have come to the last day on this project, I look back and realize how much of a ‘family’ we have become! With all my co-workers, co-ordinators, leads, and anim director, we stuck to it together for more time then we did at home. And in the end I think we were able to bring together a movie worth watching!

I’d also like to thank Sony Pictures Image works for giving us the morale support we needed. Getting us breakfast and lunch and dinners, as well as those occasional coffee from JJ Bean and other coffee shops, and the masseuse at the end of the project so that our backs don’t break! It really helped to keep us going… especially the coffee =)

 

I for one will be looking forward to seeing Oz: The Great and Powerful on the big screen!
What a great team to work with!

Art Institute of Vancouver Alumni

During this month, the Art Institute of Vancouver hosted their first Alumni Reception & Exibihition Evening which they will make an annual event out of it. My former classmates and I have been contacted to be featured on the alumni wall at the school with our post graduate achievements in the industry. Here is my interview:

You can check out more about the event here at http://celebr8ai.com/vancouver/#

Late Chow! “The Fourth and Best Meal of the Day”

In the beginning of this year, a couple of my co-workers started a Youtube channel called “Late Chow”. Broadcasting their own show about the 4th and best meal of the day! This past halloween, since I have been collecting more and more video gear and wanted to start using it more, I had the chance to help them shoot some of it. We had a big group of our co-workers come out dressed up as zombies. It was a lot of fun to help film it. Josh Riley and Phan Wiantrakoon (the creators of the show) put a lot of work in this, and I totally recommend checking it out! Especially if you love food =)

They air a show every 2 weeks or so, so subscribe if you like to see more coming!
http://www.youtube.com/user/LateChow

New demo reel for 2012 – Men in Black 3

After finishing production on Men in black 3 in April, I finally got a chance to update my demo reel with some new shots.  Its been a busy summer, starting Wizard of Oz, going on vacation to Indonesia for 3 weeks, and moving down town next week!  But finally, I was motivated to finish my reel when Art Institute of Vancouver contacted my wife and I for an ‘alumni success’ story.

Even though I finished around 30 shots on this movie, most of the work was motorcycle wheel replacement and environment replacement.  I did get a chance to animate a few cool creatures.  Such as the alien fish and the weasel (insect creature).  I even got a chance to animate a couple CG digital double where Boris grabs Griffin onto his motorcycle and rides off the stadium.  The video is posted on my homepage at the top, check it out!

Or click the link here

 

Oz: The Great and Powerful

It has been almost 3 months since I started working on the new Wizard of Oz movie! The best part about working on this film is that we get to animate monkeys. But not just any monkeys, flying monkeys! This is pretty much new territory for me as I have not animated much of any bird/flying shots. I am learning lots and its been pretty interesting! Just recently, Sony released the first trailer of Oz at Comic-con:

Scheduled to release on March 8th of next year, and with reshoots scheduled in the next few weeks, we have another 5 months of intense work set out for us!
Wizard of Oz
More pictures here.

My Fear of Mixing Console: Overcome

For the last couple years, I have been helping out at church with the video slides and lighting cues during service. First at Willingdon Church and now at our new CrossRidge Church. I have always sat beside the person controlling the audio mixer the whole time. Every time I looked at that thing, it always scares me with all the little buttons and dials and channels. I never understood any of it, and it looks like something you can easily just mess up with one touch of a dial! Last weekend I had the opportunity to help out with the sound mixing at our church service for the first time. Pastor Andy (who leads our music team) gave me a quick run-down on how the equipment worked. Tony, who is well versed with these equipments (as he does repair for audio equipment as his profession) also showed me how the system works. And with a half an hour quick tutorial, I was on my way to doing the service.

I was always worried about doing anything with audio, since my wife thinks I might possibly be tone deaf (especially when it comes to me singing). But I found it, if I had concentrated hard on listening to levels on each instrument, I can decipher what was too loud or too soft and if anything was causing strange feedback.. Hopefully you guys enjoyed the service last Sunday! I’ve learnt a lot and now I’m not as afraid of using the sound board!

SoundBoard at CrossRidge Church
SoundBoard at CrossRidge Church

Thanks again Andy and Tony for showing me how to use it!

Finished MiB3. Now to Oz: The Great and Powerful

So last week was my last time working on Men in Black 3. Animation has pretty much wrapped up and the lighting/compositing team is on its way to be finished! The film comes out May 25th, 2012! They just released a new trailer, which actually shows a lot of the movie… so watch at your discretion!

Today I begin my journey working on the movie ‘Oz: The Great and Powerful’ to be released spring of 2013! The plot of the film pretty much entails about how the great wizard of Oz, played by James Franco, got to where he is. It is a prequel to the famous story of ‘Wizard of Oz’. With tons of FX shots and a lot of work this is going to be one helluva production!. But from what I’ve seen already, it is looking pretty cool! The only picture I found on the internet of Oz is this one that seems to be on set material. It shows a glimpse of what the logo might be.

IMDB: Oz, The Great and Powerful

Photoshoot Portraiture: Jan Zgiet

Over the weekend I had the privilege to photograph my friend Jan Zgiet for his future online web business. We had an awesome time with our photo shoot and I got to try this new location (Surrey Central SFU Surrey) that I have been eyeing for a while. After choosing 3 locations in the building, we already felt we have taken what we need! So we didn’t get to the other locations I had in mind. I’ll save those for next time!

Here are a few shots!

Anime Revolution Title Intro

The last month or so I’ve been working on a title intro for the new Anime convention that will be held in Vancouver’s Convention Centre. Anime Revolution (Not to be confused with Anime Evolution of past events, for they are run by different organizers) is coming to town August 17 – 19th. As I was fairly busy the last few months moving into our new place and working on Men in Black 3, I had to keep this intro fairly simple.

39th Annual Annie Awards! Voting Begins!

Annie Awards

This year, Sony had selected a couple of us to go up for an Annie Award Nomination in the category of “Character Animation in a Feature Production” on The Smurfs movie. Although we did not get chosen for nominations, we were signed up to take part in casting our ballot for this years awards. The voting ends next week on the 25th leaving me with a little less than a week to catch up and see the rest of the films/commercials selected for nominations. Congratulations to all who have been nominated this year!

What I’m thankful for..

There are many things that I would consider thankful for; but for this time of the season, I have one thing I’m most thankful for. I’d like to talk about something that is very personal and hard for me to share. For the past decade I had been indulging myself in an addiction that lead me no where. I found myself losing satisfaction in the ‘norm’ which lead me to look for more immoral things to satisfy my cravings. It was a never-ending cycle. Only in the past few years, I realized this addiction had to stop before it goes any further. Trying my best and looking for help from others as well as reading books seemed to help a bit, but I would always end up giving in as I struggled hard with it. It was only a few weeks ago did one of my friend who had the same addiction problem suggested I take a course at SettingCaptivesFree.com. Already being 1 week in, I’ve learnt so many new things about the power of Jesus and how He can set me free from this addiction for good. It really feels like I am being set free already! And for this, I am the most thankful for, I really am..

Happy thanksgiving everyone.

Our Friend’s Testimony

Over the weekend, I had filmed our friend and helped her create this video for her school project. This was a fun and challenging project bringing up new problems we haven’t experienced before. It was my first time doing ADR (automated dialogue replacement) and my first time getting a friends to play the background music. But the best thing we got out of this was to hear our friend’s story that we never knew about it. With her permission, she has agreed to share her personal life with others. She really is an incredible person.

Willingdon Church Evacuation Project – the Last 10 months

For the last 10 months I have been working on a side project for the church. It was to demonstrate to the congregation where to exit and where to meet in an event of an emergency. This project took me a while to do because it was outside of my work time and modeling the church wasn’t as easy as I first thought it would be! I give respect to the architect who designed our church. When you look around the building it seems like any other normal building, but there was a lot of thought put into designing that church and when you start modeling it, you realize you don’t even know what beam is connected to where and how tall each windows are and how walls line up!

In this project, I ended up modeling, texturing, rigging (the arrows), animating, lighting (with vray), and rendering the shots. Another church member will be compiling the shots in sequential order with slides in-between them. Can’t wait to see the final edited version of this!

The start of Men in Black 3 Production!

Men in Black 3 Movie

Today marks my first day on the Men in Black 3 production. Looking at a few of the sequences from the live action shoot, it looks like this will be a pretty fun and exciting movie to work on! Will Smith, Tommy Lee Jones, and Rip Torn are part of the crew as they will also be keeping the same cast as the previous MIB. Josh Brolin will be the new “Young Agent K” giving you a little insight on what MIB3 will be about. 😉

More info at: IMDB link